Contextualising Expectations: Reconfiguring Progressive Politics in the Post-Industrial Era

Abstract

Like the rest of this volume, this paper emerges out of the 2016 annual meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth (ASA). The conference took place just ten days after the UK referendum on EU membership, and most of its delegates were still in shock: the UK had voted for ‘Brexit’, a British exit from the EU. Everyone was talking about the result: at the drinks reception, during the breaks, whilst roaming the corridors. Laura Bear delivered a fiery Firth Lecture (published as Bear 2017), in which she demanded that anthropologists take a more critical political-economic stance. Many presenters prefixed their talks with more or less detailed allusions to Brexit’s potentially dire consequences. The 2016 meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), I presume, must have featured similar allusions. As a result of the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit, delegates at both conferences had witnessed highly politicised moments in time. Arguably, both of these events were major turning points in recent political history. They had caught the profession “off-guard” (Bessire and Bond 2017) and, in the eyes of many colleagues, cemented a crisis of liberalism (see e.g. Boyer 2016; Dzenovska and Kurtović 2018). At the ASA meeting, there was a tangible sense of urgency, despair, and hopelessness: a feeling that we had lost our grip on the world we claim to represent.